A Backward Glance at Eighty eBook

Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, February
25, 1836. His father was a highly educated instructor
in Greek, of English-Jewish descent. His mother
was an Ostrander, a cultivated and fine character of
Dutch descent. His grandmother on his father’s
side was Catherine Brett. He had an elder brother
and two younger sisters. The boys were voracious
readers and began Shakespeare when six, adding Dickens
at seven. Frank developed an early sense of humor,
burlesquing the baldness of his primer and mimicking
the recitations of some of his fellow pupils when
he entered school. He was studious and very soon
began to write. At eleven he sent a poem to a
weekly paper and was a little proud when he showed
it to the family in print. When they heartlessly
pointed out its flaws he was less hilarious.

His father died when he was very young and he owed
his training to his mother. He left school at
thirteen and was first a lawyer’s clerk and
later found work in a counting-room. He was self-supporting
at sixteen. In 1853 his mother married Colonel
Andrew Williams, an early mayor of Oakland, and removed
to California. The following year Bret and his
younger sister, Margaret, followed her, arriving in
Oakland in March, 1854.

He found the new home pleasant. The relations
with his cultivated stepfather were congenial and
cordial, but he suffered the fate of most untrained
boys. He was fairly well educated, but he had
no trade or profession. He was bright and quick,
but remunerative employment was not readily found,
and he did not relish a clerkship. For a time
he was given a place in a drugstore. Some of
his early experiences are embalmed in “How Reuben
Allen Saw Life” and in “Bohemian Days.”
In the latter he says: “I had been there
a week,—­an idle week, spent in listless
outlook for employment, a full week, in my eager absorption
of the strange life around me and a photographic sensitiveness
to certain scenes and incidents of those days, which
stand out in my memory today as freshly as on the
day they impressed me.”

It was a satisfaction that he found some congenial
work. He wrote for Putnam’s and
the Knickerbocker.

In 1856, when he was twenty, he went to Alamo, in
the San Ramon Valley, as tutor in an interesting family.
He found the experience agreeable and valuable.

A letter to his sister Margaret, written soon after
his arrival, shows a delightful relation between them
and warm affection on his part. It tells in a
felicitous manner of the place, the people, and his
experiences. He had been to a camp-meeting and
was struck with the quaint, old-fashioned garb of
the girls, seeming to make the ugly ones uglier and
the pretty ones prettier. It was raining when
he wrote and he felt depressed, but he sent his love
in the form of a charming bit of verse wherein a tear
was borne with the flowing water to testify to his
tender regard for his “peerless sister.”